Laying the Groundwork

Before delving into theory and the case study, there is some groundwork to establish and cover.

Asian American Multi-Identity

In the city’s public institution of education forty-two years ago, San Francisco State University’s students led a Third World strike that lasted five month. It was one of the longest campus strikes in history and climaxed to a cultural and ethnic explosion. Students participating in the strike, fought for “equal access to public higher education, more faculty of colour, and a new curriculum that would now be called ‘ethnic studies’” (Springer)….Read more

Asian American Portrayals in Mainstream Media

Drawing from Stuart Hall’s essay on “Racist Ideologies and the Media”, it is important to first understand from a sociological standpoint that hegemonic ideology in media emerges from the way power relations have been historically constructed. Media’s “imagery and themes are polarized around fixed relations of subordination and domination,” which has stemmed from historical relations such as colonization, and in turn, legitimizes white superiority and non-white inferiority in popular culture (Hall, 274)…Read More